Highlights from the SEW Blog: August 21, 2006

Featured posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well as our customary headlines from around the web. If you're not familiar with our blog, click on any of the links below, or visit the blog's home page at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/.

From The SEW Blog...

Washington Post Selling Text Links? Steve Rubel reported that the Washington Post launched a sponsored blogroll product that allows people to pay to be listed in the blogroll. You can see it live on the right hand bottom portion of the WashingtonPost.com web site. I dug into the source code to discover the blogroll is not using the search engine suggested nofollow attribute, which Google in particular pushes to be used for paid links. However, it is using some sort of JavaScript tracking code, that may or may not limit the PageRank and link popularity to flow to those sites advertised....

Levi.com Quietly Drops Google Checkout Due To A "Particular Issue" MarketWatch reports that Levi Strauss & Co.'s has dropped the Google Checkout option from Levi.com, their main web site. Steve Davis, from the firm that Levi used to integrated Checkout, said they dropped it from Levi.com due to a "particular issue," which was not disclosed (as far as I can tell). What is important to note is that Levi Strauss left Google Checkout on the dockers.com web site, so that issue couldn't of been a huge one or even a global issue (I suspect). I personally have yet to implement Google Checkout on any site, so I cannot speak from...

Google Data Refresh: More Supplemental Results? Wednesday night, Thursday morning, forum threads starting popping up about a Google "data refresh" taking place. A data refresh is like a small Google update, and many webmasters have noticed a change in the search results at Google. Google has not yet confirmed that there has been an update, nor has there been a ton of discussion on the topic, as of yet. That is why I believe this is a "data refresh" and not a full fledge algorithmic change. Part of the data refresh seems to have put many pages into the supplemental index, an index that no webmaster...

About the author

Chris Sherman is a frequent contributor to several information industry journals. He's written several books, including The McGraw-Hill CD ROM Handbook and The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See, co-authored with Gary Price. Chris has written about search and search engines since 1994, when he developed online searching tutorials for several clients. From 1998 to 2001, he was About.com's Web Search Guide.

The U.K. Supreme Court has granted permission in part for Google to appeal against a ruling relating to a dispute over the user information through cookies via use of the Apple Safari browser.
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